HIRANO LABORATORY
Neuronal and Molecular Mechanism of Behavioral Plasticity, and Diversity
Why occasionally do we change our mind? How are humans so diverse? We are trying to understand the neuronal and molecular mechanisms that answer these questions. This may be equivalent to ask how we can define ourselves. We believe that Drosophila model will provide the core mechanism since they are living in simple life with less complicated brain. Cognitive functions deteriorate with age, although it is variable depending on the individuals. To tackle this issue, we also aim to understand how aging can be variable within the population, by visualizing aging individuality.
RESEARCH
Personal philosophy
We believe that there are two types of ART in life science!
First type of art is in the living organism. The body and its controlling brain are well-organized under the well-proportioned balance. The brain function can be further affected by memory, and updated to adjust ourselves to the environment. It is surprising that such elaborate work is automatically achieved using the genetic information written in DNA, and creates life. It is a greatest moment as a biologist when we find a path to understand this art.
Second type of art is inside of us, i.e. our thought and logical flow. We start from a simple question, make a hypothesis, collect evidences, and propose a model. In addition, the new findings is not coming from out of nowhere, but should be rational to explain a phenomenon. Therefore, we keep asking to ourselves, “IF SO… ?”, then we start again to validate the model to support rationality. We will be under the extraordinary excited state, when we build up the logical structure. After months or years of struggling, we can finally feel this art, which cannot be replaced by anything else.
We deeply enjoy these art, and hope that our findings can contribute to the society!!
RESEARCH SUBJECT 1:
THE NEURONAL AND MOLECULAR MECHANISMS OF COGNITIVE FUNCTIONS RELATED TO MEMORY
Neural activity changes the molecular architecture in the nucleus, which eventually alters animals' behavior. So far, we have focused on the molecular events in the nucleus of the specific type of neurons, by collecting them through our original methods. By employing proteomics analysis from specific type of neurons, we also illustrated the molecular actions related to memory consolidation. We are now trying very hard to collect specific synapses which more explains the cognitive functions related to memory.
RESEARCH SUBJECT 2:
VISUALIZATION OF AGING INDIVIDUALITY
Why are we different? Perhaps, stochastically some or many factors fluctuate, and create the biological distribution. Biological analyses have been focused on average or median of the population, however, understanding living organism may be achieved by paying attention to the outliners, because we all possess a feature of some sort of outliners. One way to tackle this issue is to develop a method that visualizes and determines the outliners. We now launched the project to visualize the outliners in aging, in other words, aging individuality.
